


dreamboy

by brophigenia



Series: dreamboy (the prokopenko AU) [1]
Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Anal Sex, Bilingual Character(s), Body Horror, Book 2: The Dream Thieves, Canon-Typical Violence, Discussion of Dubcon Re: Aurora Lynch/Niall Lynch, Dream Pack, Drug Abuse, Drunk Sex, F/M, Happy Ending, Hetero Sex in the beginning, Homophobic Language, Hostage Situations, I listened to a lot of russian trap for this fic, Joseph Kavinsky Lives, Joseph Kavinsky is His Own Warning, M/M, Minor Joseph Kavinsky/Ronan Lynch, Nightmares, Prokopenko Backstory, Prokopenko Lives, Recreational Drug Use, Suicidal Ideation, Unhealthy Relationships, Vaginal Sex, misogynistic language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-16
Updated: 2018-04-16
Packaged: 2019-04-23 20:58:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14340777
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brophigenia/pseuds/brophigenia
Summary: The first Dream he has in America is in his grandmother’s tiny apartment in Pennsylvania, far away from anyone who knows either of them. It’s a shitty sort of place, shittier than their old place in Magnitogorsk and worlds away from his father’s house in Moscow. He sleeps in a tiny bedroom barely big enough for a narrow twin bed, attends a shitty public middle school. He only has a basic grasp of English, speaks slowly and with lots of mistakes that make the other kids laugh at him. They laugh until he punches them, and then they don’t fucking laugh anymore. He’s skinny and short but full of viciousness; his fists are sharp with protruding bones.(AKA, what if Prokopenko had been the other dream thief, not Kavinsky.)





	dreamboy

The party is a tangle of  _ thrumming _ , the music in his chest and the people breathing in his ears and the movement of their bodies in the floors, traveling up through his feet. He is a vibration of the echoes of life all around him. His head aches. 

(Does he like this, or does he hate it? Who the fuck knows? How is he supposed to figure it out?) 

He runs his fingertips over the wall as he walks, keeps himself steady. He’s had a lot of vodka, smoked a lot of weed, took a few  _ somethings  _ in red and blue and blue again. He feels unsteady, head breathlessly disconnected from his body, vibrating. 

( _ I wanna go home,  _ he mouths childishly into his own bicep, and doesn’t know what place he’d like to retreat to. His dorm room? His grandmother’s apartment? The old house in Magnitogorsk? The mansion in Moscow?) 

He vomits in a bathroom and maybe flushes it before he goes, maybe doesn’t. It’s hard to think. K is somewhere in the house and his head hurts. 

There is a girl— an impression of long white-blonde hair and dark skin and lips that taste  _ pink  _ the way girls do when they’ve had so much sweetly-flavored Burnetts that they can’t see straight. She tastes like that and Proko has been doing this for so long that it’s not hard to sink a hand into that hair, stiff at the roots with hairspray and damp on the ends with sweat, kiss that soft mouth, smearing lipstick and gloss and strawberry-watermelon-alcohol-saliva around with his lips, his tongue. 

She moans into his mouth. It sounds like a bird crying. Everything is slow and fucked-around, like when he goes too long between sleeping and falls into his dreams before he can calm down. 

He kisses down her throat and rubs her clit slowly with three fingers pressed into a firm bar of bone and flesh and muscle memory. 

(When did his hand get down her pants?) 

When she moans again it’s louder and deeper, thicker, like he’s startled her into reality. She sniffles the way people do when it’s better than they’d been preparing themselves for. She comes and sobs once with it, claws at his back with her long acrylic nails to drag him closer to her. They fuck like that, in the hallway with his jeans down and his ass exposed and his knees bruising themselves against the wall with every rocking thrust  _ up  _ and  _ in  _ that he makes. She’s pretty, all black-rimmed eyes and fake eyelashes and running mascara, mouth open and no sounds making it out. She strokes his face gentler than he’d have expected, if he was able to think straight. 

He pulls out and comes against her bare, slim, orangey-dark thighs— shivers out of his skin with it (and with the drugs.) 

He gets his jeans back up, zips them but can’t quite manage the button. Some guy has his phone out, must have recorded the whole thing. He doesn’t look drunk enough to be there, so Proko punches him, numb enough that he doesn’t feel it when his knuckles split. He swears, maybe in Russian, and spits at the guy where he’s laid out on the ground. It feels better than the fucking did.  

The party is still alive, roiling. 

He makes it down to the ground level, looks around and feels mean with it, satisfied around his hips and his bleeding hand but  _ wanting  _ in the stretch of his shoulders, the beginnings of the bruises on his knees. 

(Where the  _ fuck  _ is K?) 

He sees Skov, does the shot that somebody pushes into his hand before he speaks, tongues his lower lip after and resists the urge to squirm and press his hand to his cock, not-softened in his jeans. 

“Th’ fuck is K?” He manages to mumble once he can straighten out the pathways in his brain that lead to his English. It comes out sounding more like something else, harsh in the syllables and curling in the vowels, but Skov understands well enough for all that he doesn’t even fucking know his father’s language, something that’s always rankled Proko somewhere simmering and low. 

“Out,” he shrugs and cuts his eyes the way they all do when they don’t wanna say  _ out with Lynch  _ to Proko’s face. Not even Swan wants to face that wrath. It usually makes Proko feel an edge of power underneath the current of betrayed fury, but right now all he can taste is the iron tang of his rage. 

He finds a girl, white-blonde and orange-dark. Not the same one. This one tastes like cheap pumpkin spice liquor even though it’s fucking April; she is out of season and a little more reckless around the edges even if her hands are more tentative than her predecessor’s. He fucks her harder for it, looks into her eyes the whole time and wants to start screaming. His hands shake. He comes on her stomach and then goes to throw up again in the backyard, dodging her seeking hands, trying to drag him down onto the couch with her. 

He takes the joint someone passes him after he’s done retching. His jeans are unzipped  _ and  _ unbuttoned now. There’s a line of  _ something _ scraped up on the glass-topped patio table and he shoulders whoever-the-fuck out of the way to snort it up. His hands are still shaking. He can’t feel them. He feels like maybe he’s gonna die. His heart is beating so fast and his eyelids are so heavy. 

He finds a spot in the grass that isn’t occupied by a body or vomit or someone’s discarded shoes and lays down. The world spins even though he’s being completely still. He closes his eyes and thinks again  _ maybe this is when I die.  _

Wouldn’t that be fucking funny? 

***

The first Dream he has in America is in his grandmother’s tiny apartment in Pennsylvania, far away from anyone who knows either of them. It’s a shitty sort of place, shittier than their old place in Magnitogorsk and worlds away from his father’s house in Moscow. He sleeps in a tiny bedroom barely big enough for a narrow twin bed, attends a shitty public middle school. He only has a basic grasp of English, speaks slowly and with lots of mistakes that make the other kids laugh at him. They laugh until he punches them, and then they don’t fucking laugh anymore. He’s skinny and short but full of viciousness; his fists are sharp with protruding bones. 

His grandmother cries whenever he comes with split knuckles and a bleeding mouth, a black eye. She begs him, says  _ Ilya please don’t fight anymore!  _ But she doesn’t order him— his grandmother is good at never telling him to do impossible things. She knows what’s in his blood, what was in his father’s, and in his father’s father’s. 

They go to mass every week, sometimes twice a week. He kneels and crosses himself and murmurs every contrition he knows. He confesses his sins in broken English. 

The first time he Dreams in this new country comes after he’s caught by one of the older boys who doesn’t like  _ fuckin illegals—  _ as if anyone who was not born in America has no right to occupy space there, regardless of their immigration status _.  _ The boy is wearing a gold chain that sparkles with diamonds and Ilya is transfixed by it even as the boy is pummeling him.  

He’s a beautiful boy, with golden hair shorn close to his head and broad shoulders that frame the beautiful golden chain. Ilya is almost sorry to hurt him, but once he feels his nose break he decides that enough is enough. 

He thinks about taking the necklace once the boy is not-so-beautiful-anymore and writhing on the ground, swearing and clutching his bleeding face. 

He does not, because he thinks of retribution and of Moscow and his grandmother weeping. 

Instead, he limped home and jerked off (a new sort of miracle he’d only recently discovered, a sin to add to his long list that surely shocked the priest weekly) and then fell into bed, bloodying his sheets as he tossed and turned his way into sleep. 

The Dream had been taffy and molasses, slow and sweet. The boy’s knuckles had been soft when they’d traced the ridge of Ilya’s cheekbones. His mouth had been soft against Ilya’s lips. Neither of them were bleeding. 

In the Dream, Ilya unfastened the necklace from around the boy’s throat and wrapped it thrice around his own wrist, proffered his vulnerable limb so the boy could do up the clasp for him gently. 

He awoke with the thing glinting against his skin and stared at it with hooded eyes for a long moment, twisting his wrist this way and that to watch the diamonds sparkle in the low light from the small window. 

He didn’t wear it; he didn’t want to see how stupid it would look on him, with his skinny  _ everything  _ and shitty Goodwill clothes, and he didn’t want his grandmother to see it. She’d either know the truth of it and cry or think he’d stolen it and cry. Either way, he didn’t want to fucking hear it. 

He hid it away with the other things he didn’t want found and moved along with his head down and his fists clenched, waiting. 

Waiting.  

***

He woke up in a puddle of his own vomit with something clenched tight in his left hand. 

He didn’t look at it right away; he groaned and shut his eyes tight, turning his face into the grass to hide from the sun. 

He could hear Jiang shout  _ what’s up, fuckers?  _ somewhere in the distance, not to him. A couple girls nearby were cursing in thick Henrietta accents as they collected themselves enough to go back to whatever trailer they’d rolled out of. 

He feels uncharitable and unhurried in his hangover and tries to remember what fucking day it is. 

_ Tuesday.  _ He’s got a Latin final later, with the sub they’d gotten after Whelk had flown the coop. He  _ fucking _ hates Latin. The  _ words _ part of his brain already feels stretched thin sometimes; he loses his English easily when he’s tired or upset. It’s something that has always frustrated him. He dreams in Russian, not English— everyone, even Swan and Skov and Jiang, speaks his mother tongue in his Dreams. 

When he was fourteen and fresh meat, that was how he’d met K. He’d only had to speak English daily for two years at that point, and coming off of a summer spent mostly hanging out with his grandmother, he was sharp-tongued and magpie-eyed. The words slipped away from him in his fluster trying to get to the right class. 

He’d said something low and rough and  _ filthy  _ in Russian, only to have it answered in nasally New Jersey-tinged bastardized Russian with more Bulgarian words thrown in than Prokopenko cared to count. It gave him a headache— his grandmother had always instilled in him the need for perfect grammar and vocabulary, at least when it came to their shared language. If he was going to be a fucking goon, he wasn’t going to  _ sound  _ like one. 

But K managed somehow to sound like a prince even with his roughly-hewn, cobbled-together words. He was sniffling, a little coked out even early in the morning on the first day of school, and his shoulders were broad even if they were also skeletal. 

It had been like that since the beginning— K being a motherfucker and Proko helplessly into him.  _ In love  _ with him, what the fuck. 

He opens his fist and looks at what he’s dreamed up this time— they are slim leather bands, all in a little pile, so dark brown they seem raven-black, and Proko snarls at the sight of them, dead ringers for the ones helping to cover up the evidence of Lynch’s failed attempt at getting the hell out of Henrietta, or whatever the fuck he’d been trying to do. 

He rips up a patch of grass and buries them there before anyone else can see, stumbling to his feet and puking one more time in the rhododendron bushes before making his way inside, following the sound of Jiang’s bellows. 

***

He rode to school with Swan and he skips English after slouching his way to a C on the Latin test, third period. The sun is too bright; he needs sunglasses, but every time he’s out shopping he forgets, buys bags of all-dressed chips and black cherry Powerades and cigarettes instead. He could dream them, but what would be the point of that? 

K squeals into the parking lot practically on two wheels like he’s auditioning for  _ the Fast and the Furious 9.  _ It should be painfully ridiculous. Instead, the sight of him like a specter in the driver's seat makes Proko half-hard already, tongue darting out to swipe at his lips. 

He’s still pissed, but not at K. Not even really at Lynch, either. He mostly just hates himself for not being the shiniest fuckin’ toy boy in Henrietta. He’s not got a fugly emo tattoo or an outwardly tragic background or a vulnerable, shaved scalp. He doesn’t spend all his time being a fuckup with an adrenaline addiction. If he did, K would probably spend as much time chasing him as K does chasing Lynch. 

“Get in, bitch,” K says, in English, even more nasally than he is in Russian. Proko flicks his spent roach to the concrete, steps on it as he’s climbing into the Mitsu’s front seat. 

“Let’s fucking go,” he says in Russian, and closes his eyes in something like pleasure when K  _ guns it.  _

Mnogoznaal blares through the speakers of the Evo and Proko nods vaguely along, blinking slow and far-apart, fuckin spaced. It feels good: the wind whipping in the windows, the low-down-and-lazy weed high, the way the bass vibrates through his back, up into his chest. It all feels good. He spreads his thighs in his uniform pants, the material drawing tight over his cock, chubbing up in his boxer briefs. 

K drives fast, faster, fastest. They’re flying through Henrietta so fucking  _ fast _ . His Golf doesn’t get this fast, even if he’s got it tinkered with enough that it’ll outstrip Swan’s matching one. (And  _ fuck  _ he’d been so pissed when Swan showed up with his own fucking M7,  _ fuck.)  _

They’re on the hunt, K’s eyes scanning their surroundings. Waiting. Watching. 

K is playing a game and Proko isn’t invited, but since  _ Bytch _ isn’t around yet, he decides to press his luck. Freshman Year K would’ve been as likely to punch him as fuck him, but ever since what happened at the lake, he leans  _ hard _ for the latter. With this in mind, Proko lights up a Parliament from the pack he finds when he slides a hand into K’s jacket pocket and rubs his palm idly over his cock, exhaling smoke and a groan that’s drowned up by the stereo. 

K gives him the side eye, doesn’t comment. Yet. Proko grins around the filter, too out of it to concentrate on anything but  _ this.  _ He arches his hips up, up off the seat, pushes them harder into his hand, ashing with a tap of his tongue and a tilt of his chin that means both his hands are free and the windflow snatches the ash and sweeps it out the window before it can hit anybody’s clothes or skin or  _ leather seats.  _

His spare hand creeps across the dash, carefully not blocking K’s right arm on the gearshift, curls greedily over K’s lean thigh. 

“Fuck me,” he mumbles around the cigarette, not in English. He says it in Bulgarian, because he knows curse words in the language even if he’s aggravated by the nonsensical rest of it. K swallows and cuts his eyes over when he hears the words, and Proko feels victory simmering in his stomach. 

“Goddamn,” K says, affecting a grin and reaching over to steal his smoke. “Hot for it, huh?” 

Proko’s reply is interrupted by the roaring growl of Lynch’s Beamer. He rolls his eyes as K’s attention snaps away. 

***

He doesn’t like the curling grin that K gets when he looks at Lynch. He doesn’t like the fond sweep of K’s eyes behind his ever-present sunglasses over Lynch’s body, his shoulders and his teeth and his stupid tattoo. He doesn’t like  _ this,  _ sitting in the Evo’s passenger seat, waiting. Waiting waiting  _ waiting _ , head aching from too much drinking last night or too little hair of the dog this morning, watching K talk to Lynch with his hands shoved into his pockets. 

He’s maybe feeling some type of way when he rolls the window down and leans out, arm dangling against the hot side of the Evo, a pleasant sort of burn. “K, can we go?” He asks, teeth baring, pointedly in Russian. “Let’s go to yours and get baked,” he likes that it makes Lynch’s shoulders get tight, the sound of his words in a language the fucker’s not privy to. 

K glances at him, torn. For all that he’s a young prince in their midst, he’s also seventeen and ruled by his hormones. Proko licks his lips, quirks them into half a dirty grin.  _ Fuck me fuck me fuck me,  _ he makes his eyes say. 

Lynch coughs, uncomfortable, and K slants a smile at him, sweet and beguiling the way he never is with Proko. “We’ll finish this later,” he says to Lynch, pointing at him as he walks away like he’s some bigshot executive in a shitty HBO show. Lynch blinks at him, exhaustion in every line of his body. 

Again, it feels like victory. Better than Dreaming. Better than Creating. K wraps a hand around  _ his  _ thigh this time, as he steers the Evo out onto the road leading to the dorms. 

“Gonna fuck me in my bed?” Proko asks him, making his voice coy. K’s hand tightens, convulsively. Losing his cool. 

He hasn’t fucked anyone in days— didn’t come to the party,  _ sure as fuck  _ didn’t fuck Lynch, with that stick up his ass. K isn’t one for self-denial. 

Proko knows it’s gonna be good, when K wants it this bad. 

***

He likes it best on his knees and elbows, body curved into a bow. The tension in his muscles, the effort, makes everything better. Sharper. The stretch inside his thighs makes the snap of K’s hips even more potent. 

K is a good fuck; desperate, grasping,  _ gasping _ . He snarls filth into the space between Proko’s shoulder blades and keeps restlessly tugging at his hip. 

“More more more,” Proko snarls, throwing his weight back. He’s bigger than K; wider through the chest, thicker through the lower body. Less coke-starved. He actually goes to the fucking gym. K drags his nails down from Proko’s collarbones to his navel, scouring bright red marks. 

The pain blooms bright and sweet against the backs of his eyelids and Proko feels fucking  _ inspired,  _ shoulders backwards hard enough that they both fall in a heap, his back to K’s chest so he can control the pace. 

“Baby boy,” K mumbles, caught, helplessly fond, and Proko can barely turn his sob into a moan as he loses himself in it. He doesn’t know when or if K comes; he ends up sprawled on his stomach in the narrow bed, hurriedly wiping the betraying saltwater from the corners of his eyes. 

K falls next to him, exhausted, and Proko falls asleep like that, with K’s warm breath on the back of his neck and his woodash boy-smell in his nose, clouding his thoughts. 

It’s too much; he should get up and go  _ do  _ something, run this off. Shouldn’t get used to it. 

But he  _ wants  _ to get used to it. 

He closes his eyes. Falls asleep to the gentle whistle of K’s deviated septum. 

***

In the Dream, Lynch’s irises are blue-black and his lips are an unfairly lush Cupid’s bow like dewy rose petals. 

It makes Proko clench his fists and think of how K would look into those eyes, would trace his fingertips over those lips, if given half a fucking chance. 

Lynch smiles, a strange expression.  _ Ilya,  _ he says, in Proko’s father’s voice. The golden chain shines around his neck. Proko takes a stumbling, hesitant step forward at the sound of his father’s voice. He steps back when he sees the way Lynch’s unnaturally-dark irises are rippling like disturbed water. 

Lynch steps forward, reaches out a hand. His stupid emo tattoo has flowed down from his shoulder to his palm like ink, spiraling. It resolves itself into a grinning, two-headed eagle. 

He remembers the last time he’d seen that eagle; his father had been on the ground, heaving and bleeding, spitting curses. Not screaming, not even at the end. Proko had been Ilya, had been hidden in the closet and peering through the cracks in the folding doors, his hands clapped over his mouth to keep quiet. 

The hitman had been grim-faced, wearing a black silk shirt and a ruby-adorned crucifix. He said  _ it did not have to come to this, scum,  _ and then finally put a bullet in Proko’s father’s forehead. 

The eagle had grinned the entire time, two heads and two grins, even as Proko’s father’s hand had spasmed, fingers briefly hiding it from view before they uncurled, limp, to leave it exposed, palms facing up like he was a martyr. A faceless martyr, a mess of blood and pulp that had once been Proko’s father. 

Lynch speaks again.  _ You are a man, now,  _ he says, still in the stolen voice, quoting the last thing Proko heard his uncle say, before he and his grandmother escaped to America.  _ Your revenge must wait.  _

Proko’s fists clench. He says  _ you fucking cunt,  _ and then there is a gun in his hand, small and shiny and unreal. Heavy. He raises it and fires. 

In the split second between him firing and his bullet finding flesh and bone, Lynch’s face becomes K’s. It shatters like porcelain. There is so much blood. 

***

He wakes up gasping and lurches into the bathroom to vomit, abdomen heaving. He doesn’t realize that he’s brought the shiny, unreal gun with him until its sharp edges break the skin of the webbing between his thumb and first finger because he’s clenching his fists so tight. 

He stuffs it hurriedly under a pile of towels as K pads into the bathroom. He doesn’t comment, moves behind Proko and runs cold water to soak a washcloth in, lays it on the back of Proko’s neck. If there’s one thing K knows, it’s how to feel better when you’re puking your fucking guts out. 

He runs long, damp fingers through Proko’s hair, slicks the long length of his sharp undercut back so that it won’t get in the way. 

When Proko is done, he rests his cheek against the cool porcelain and flushes, shoulders shuddering with each ragged, sour breath. 

K still doesn’t speak, steps forward enough that Proko can lean his head on K’s thigh instead of on the dirty toilet seat. His fingers are cool when he strokes them through Proko’s hair again, this time in comfort. 

_ I love you,  _ Proko mouths to the floor, only because he’s certain K can’t see him. 

“Let’s get some fuckin’ breakfast,” K says after a while, wrapping a hand around Proko’s bicep to drag him upright. 

Proko nods, goes off to find a shirt and even sort of grins when K slaps him on the ass as he passes. 

He leaves the shiny, unreal, Dream gun beneath the pile of towels, resolves to get it later. He knows Skov won’t be back anytime soon, knows that even if he did, he wouldn’t be doing any fucking laundry. Fucker was too lazy to even call the laundry service. 

K takes him out for syrniki at a little hole in the wall place an hour outside of Henrietta. 

( _ Well _ , an hour of K’s driving.) 

*** 

K throws a substance party and Proko thinks of not going. He stares at his reflection in the bathroom mirror for a solid thirty minutes, considering. He’s got a ten pager to write for his English final. He’s not in the mood to get fucked up and deal with the Dreams that come with it. He doesn’t like Creating on accident. 

He decides not to go, and then puts on a black tee shirt and trousers, a silver chain with a small crucifix that his grandmother bought him for Christmas two years before. The gold Dream chain is hidden in his sock drawer, balled up in a pair of emerald green Armani socks that clash with his Aglionby uniform. 

As soon as he gets to the party Jiang hands him a fifth of cheap-ass vodka, knocks their shoulders together. Proko takes a swig and looks out into the fiery wreckage that is this shitshow of a party. “He’s bad tonight,” Jiang says out of the corner of his mouth, expression not changing. Proko offers him the bottle. 

“Lynch is here,” Jiang continues, after he’s taken a gulp, and Proko stiffens, bares his teeth. 

“S’cool,” he mumbles, and reconsiders not getting fucked the fuck up. He feels like he’s going to fucking pieces. He closes his eyes and sees K’s face fucking exploding, sees Lynch like he’d been in the dream, dark-eyed and drowning in ink, too-tempting.  _ Beguiling.  _ The kind of boy that would’ve made Proko’s grandmother cluck her tongue, a sharp and derisive  _ tch!  _ like he deserved everything he got, no matter how harsh. 

He tries to go back to his car, leave. Hunches his shoulders and tries to disappear as he crosses the filthy and scorched grass of the field. “Proko!” K bellows, off to the side somewhere. “PROKOPENKO!” And Proko ducks his head, sniffs hard and sets his jaw, keeps walking. 

“Ilyusha!” K’s voice echoes, ridiculous in its volume and pitch.  _ Ridiculous,  _ and his hackles rise without his permission. 

For all that he loves K and wants nothing more than to suck his dick every day for the rest of forever, Proko’s blood  _ roils.  _

No one but his grandmother calls him that, no one fucking  _ dares—  _ but K does, and the only other time he’d said it had been the dead of night on top of some abandoned building, pulling Proko closer and closer like he wanted to crawl inside of his skin and fucking  _ live  _ there.  _ Ilyusha,  _ he’d mumbled clumsily, a mutt of a boy, the exiled prince of a New Jersey Bulgarian crime syndicate, all cigar-burn scars and protruding ribs, and Proko had known then that this was a wound he would never be able to close. 

He’d been bleeding out slowly since then, dying from it, but even dying things have their limits, don’t they? 

He whirls on K, jaw still clenched tight, when K’s skeletal hand closes on his elbow. 

“Proko, what the fuck-“ K starts, obnoxious and obscenely  _ American,  _ and Proko lets his fist fly. He is always angry,  _ always,  _ and even though K’s presence had always been like a calming drug to his fury he always knew it was going to fucking end like this. 

“ _ Fuck  _ you,” he snarls in Russian, wants to kick K’s fucking ribs in where he’s on his back on the ground  _ bleeding.  _ Wants to make it worse so he won’t even have the option of running back to K anymore. “ _ Fuck you.”  _

He has a bare impression of K’s shock, Dick Cubed and Lynch in the middle distance exchanging heated looks, everyone around them too fucked up to fucking notice, before he’s gone, getting into his Golf and fucking  _ leaving.  _

***

He drives until his vision is clear, until he’s not so fucked up anymore. 

Well, fucked up on the liquor, at least. 

He finds the junkyard easily, slams his way out of his fuckin’ matchy-matchy car and starts screaming, expelling all the air in his lungs violently, rattling his not-often-exercised vocal chords. 

He’s fucked up, okay? His mother is dead. His father is dead. His uncle is dead. His grandmother doesn’t fucking know anyone. He grew up like some knockoff mobster Anastasia, shuffled around so nobody would find him and put a bullet in  _ his  _ face. Nobody fucking  _ knows him.  _ Nobody except K and Jiang and Swan and Skov even really know his fucking  _ first name.  _ He is  _ Prokopenko _ . And he is proud of it— thrills at the ability to hear his real last name from everyone’s lips. He isn’t fucking hiding anymore. The sons of bitches who killed his family are dead now; he doesn’t have to hide in poverty anymore. 

He is a fucking  _ god.  _ He is a  _ god  _ and he can pull shit out of his  _ dreams _ and now there is no reason why he  _ shouldn’t _ . 

He pops the trunk, goes digging amongst gym clothes and paperback novels printed in Cyrillic for  _ something. Anything _ . 

He finds half a bottle of Xanax and three fourths a bottle of Standard and settles in for the long haul. 

***

Drugged dreaming is always more productive than sober dreaming, if only because his guard is further down. 

In the Dream, he stalks through the woods. He usually tries to avoid the Henrietta woods— they are hungry and yawning in a particularly eldritch way that, to be perfectly honest, unnerves him. Even asleep, he avoids them. 

But, fuck, what is the point anymore? 

He’s wasted so much fucking time. He’s caged himself in.  _ Nothing that feels so good is good for you _ , his grandmother always used to whisper, every time she found something inexplicable in his room.  _ They will find us. Find you.  _

He can count on both hands the number of Dream things he’d consciously Created in his life. He’d always been cautious, careful that no one could figure him out. 

Dreaming is not difficult. Creating is not difficult. Proko has been biding his time so long that it’s like breathing to pop a couple pills, wash them down with the crystalline fire that is Standard, and fall down into a Dream. 

He is a wolf in the trees, a marauder come in the night. He doesn’t know what he wants, at first, until he does. He remembers the burning fury he’d felt when Swan had showed up in his own Golf, the back of his neck hot when K had brayed a laugh at him. 

The car he Dreams up is an F-Type, black as night. If he’s going to be a fucking stereotype he may as well embrace it, huh? Drinking fucking vodka and wanting to die in the Great American Wilderness, richer than he can comprehend and  _ alone.  _

It’s not hard to pull it from the Dream. He’s always been good at it. He’s patient. He’s had to be patient. It’s not like he has a real fucking life, anyway— he’d spent so long thinking of the day he’d finally get his revenge. When he was old enough, and he’d go home to Moscow with a list of names. And then it had been  _ taken  _ from him. He’d been robbed of his fucking revenge by his dead father’s lackies, the same men who wouldn’t hesitate to come if he called, now, to make him into the king his father had been. Men who existed in the dark and who had followed a man who was larger than life. 

Mikhail Prokopenko had been a giant of a man, a jungle cat on two feet. He’d been dangerous. He’d been Proko’s  _ papa.  _ He’d given Proko gifts of impossible Dream things, fluttering metal hummingbirds that flew around the house, candies in every flavor imaginable that never melted on your tongue, a perfectly white German Shepherd pup Proko named Sashko. He’d shoved him into the closet when their house was invaded, took his face into his hands and leaned down to inhale the feathery baby-scent of six-year-old Proko’s hair before shutting the door and turning to face his death. 

K had been an enigma from the start, someone so utterly aimless and uncaring about it all. The castoff son of a cliched Bulgarian-American in a tracksuit and platinum chain. Theoretically, they were the same, K and Prokopenko. Both the heir apparent to their fathers’ seats, born for violence and a cobbled-together type of obscenity, aristocracy of an underground world. Sent to Aglionby to keep them away from their fathers’ kingdoms. 

And yet, they were so far apart it was like they didn’t even exist on the same fucking plane. What had it been, that ensnared him? Why didn’t he  _ hate  _ K, who didn’t even fucking know how good he had it? His father was alive and his kingdom was intact. He’d not been sent across the world, just three states away. And so what if K’s father was a piece of shit? Proko would’ve stuck it out. Would’ve offered up his underbelly as an ashtray if it meant holding onto his birthright. 

K was  _ weak  _ but Proko was  _ weaker,  _ because he would be the doormat that K refused to be, if given a tenth of a chance. K was the king, and Proko was his fucking dog, like he knew everyone said behind his back. He was furious and snarling and  _ aching.  _

He wakes up in the driver's seat of the Jag. 

He stares at the dash, glossy-black, at the leather covered steering wheel and the stick shift. 

His head pounds and his stomach feels rotten and hollowed-out; he hasn’t eaten since he and K went for breakfast, however many hours or days ago. Everything on him feels bruised and weak. His phone buzzes a violent tattoo against his hipbone, shoved into his pocket, and he scrubs his hands over his face, trying to clear his head. 

**_duuuuuude_ **

**_k blew up his fckin evo_ **

**_well_ **

**_lynch did_ **

**_fuckkkkkkkkkk_ **

Skov’s texts, the first in the long series, make no fucking sense. Swan’s just says  **_u ok?_ ** and Jiang’s says  **_k is going fuckin crazy bro_ ** _.  _ There are pictures of K’s Evo, burnt out, turned into a charred shell. There’s a video of Lynch throwing a Molotov into the front windshield, K’s goading howls of increasingly manic laughter. Dick Cubed dragging Lynch off with a hand around the back of his neck that’s fooling exactly no one. 

K has sent exactly no texts. This stings in a distant kind of way. 

He takes another couple of pills. Drinks until he can’t swallow anymore. Goes back down. 

The K in his Dream is softer around the edges. Less skinny. He’s got a healthy kind of glow to his cheeks. He’s wearing the gold and diamond chain that Proko has hidden in various sock drawers for almost half a decade now. 

He murmurs  _ Ilya  _ and it’s not a taunt. He draws Proko in close, feathers fingertips over where he’d usually scrape long scratches with his stubby nails. Mouths lazily and contentedly at the space beneath his left ear. He says  _ baby boy,  _ and it’s as tender as anything could ever be. 

Proko doesn’t know if he hates or loves it, this softer version of K that inhabits his mind and the Dreamscape. 

He kisses the shade and doesn’t feel bad about it. He drags the shade close to him and revels in the smoothness of its back, where the real K is awash with scars from cigars and gravel and the buckle end of an expensive belt. 

_ Wake up,  _ the shade moans in his ear. 

_ Take me with you,  _ the trees sigh around them. The air has gone plummy, the sky violet overhead but the sunshine still bright. Everything feels like a bruise. His stomach twists with a cramp and he shouts when the shade wraps its hand around his cock. Tight, the way he likes. 

_ Take me with you wake up take me with you  _ the shade says in Russian, accent purely Moscow. Proko thrusts up, trying to get more sensation. The shade isn’t wearing K’s ever-present white sunglasses. 

The shade’s fist stops moving.  _ Take me with you,  _ it demands, and its voice doesn’t sound like K’s at all. The trees are darkening, leaves going black and pulpy, dripping from the branches. 

There is something alive in the woods. Proko feels hot and suffocated. He feels like if he wrenched his eyes open now, the shade would still be on top of him. 

_ Fuck,  _ he says, and hates every molecule of his being for fucking considering it. Considering dragging this fuzzy-edged beast from the Dreamscape to be his, what? Personal sex slave?  _ Get the fuck away from me!  _ he explodes, and shoves the shade back. It falls to the ground, eyes liquid and strange and  _ wrong.  _

There is violence simmering in his throat and in his fists. He wants to keep hitting the shade, wants it to crack like porcelain, like the K in his other Dream did. He wants. He  _ wants.  _ He strides away from it, choking on his own bloodlust and ennui. 

_ Ilyusha,  _ it says, screeching like Lynch’s fucking bird,  _ Ilyusha Ilyusha Ilyusha!  _ like the stories his grandmother used to tell him about witches in the woods who knew your name and could use it against you. 

The Dreamscape rumbles, questioning.  _ Are you going to take it with you?  _

He opens his eyes. 

His phone is ringing, and he fumbles it up to his ear, harshes out _ da?  _ and waits. 

“Fuckin fuck-“ K is snarling, like a rabid dog, and Proko considers hanging up. “Pick me fucking up,” K demands, and there is something shaky and small beneath the bravado of his anger that makes Proko’s stomach cramp again. He doesn’t respond. K doesn’t seem to notice or care. “Fuckin’ Seventh and Ivy.” He snaps, and then hangs up. 

Proko stares at the dash again until his vision clears and he’s not seeing two of everything. He doesn’t feel high anymore, or drunk. He’s not sure what day it is, how long he’s been here. 

He turns the key in the Jag’s ignition, notices that the fob is cluttered with a couple of stupid keychains. It purrs to life, smooth and buzzing beneath him. Around him. Everything feels low and slow. He considers driving away, out of Henrietta. Blowing down the highway. Driving as fast as the Jag will take him. Getting the fuck out of here, one way or another. 

(Would he be no better than Lynch, then? Dead dads and fast cars and fucked up relationships with their enigmatic, cult-leader-in-training besties culminating in sliced wrists and shitty tattoos?  _ Fuck that. _ ) 

***

The corner of Seventh and Ivy is suffocatingly dark, the bulb knocked out of the streetlamp. It’s seedy and exactly the kind of place K looks like he belongs in, slouched up against a brick wall with his hands stuffed into the pockets of his ratty jeans. He looks like a hobo in DKNY and Prokopenko shudders somewhere low down with arousal, even with his fury and his jealousy still an alive thing beneath his skin. 

(Maybe even  _ more so  _ because of it.)

K takes a second to realize that the Jag is waiting for  _ him,  _ and then he slinks forward slowly, raising his eyebrows behind his omnipresent sunglasses. “Fuck, kid,” he mumbles, and bares his teeth. “Got all dressed up just for me, huh?” 

Proko doesn’t unlock the door, looks at him through the open passenger side window and considers it. K clearly expects him to, elbows leaned up against the sill and ass out like he’s some half-price rentboy instead of a New Jersey-born bastard with a Black Card in his pocket. 

At exactly the moment he’s decided to unlock the car, Three Dick’s ridiculous fucking car growls to a stop on his other side. It’s exactly zero percent surprising to see Lynch in the driver’s seat, because at this point, why the fuck not? 

Proko levels a look at him, rolls up the passenger side window and nearly catches K’s fingers in it in favor of rolling down his own window. “Lynch,” he acknowledged, with some level of grudging respect for his nemesis’ (were they enemies anymore? If he was done with K, was there any point of hating Lynch?) level of audacity. Stealing Dick Gansey the fucking Third’s fucking  _ baby,  _ who the hell was this motherfucker?

Or, perhaps more importantly, who the fuck did this motherfucker  _ think _ he was?

Lynch’s eyes glittered like beetles in the low light and his shoulders were hunched like he wanted to hide from the world, hide from himself. Like he was getting tired of existing just to fuck everything to pieces. Proko respected that. Proko could relate. 

Proko still hated his fuckin’ guts, but what could he do about it?

“You know how to handle that gorgeous piece of shit?” Lynch asked him, sounding both exhausted and wired. Like he wanted to sleep but also like he wanted to never sleep again. Again, Proko could fuckin’  _ relate.  _

Proko shrugged at him, took out a cigarette and lit it with barely any fumbling. “About as well as you can handle that ugly piece of shit,” he said on the exhale, letting his accent go thick, a lilt of musical taunting.  _ I am better than you,  _ he wanted to shout, over and over until he could half-believe it, himself. 

K was shouting something on the Jag’s other side but the world had narrowed down to the two of them, Proko and Lynch. The two of them, and no one else, except the cars they found themselves in, both stolen in some way or another. 

(Was it stealing if you created it yourself? If you breathed life into it?) 

“Listen,” Proko said, feeling mean. Feeling vicious. “I gotta fuckin’ know,” he was winding up for it, taking breaks to inhale and exhale smoke. “Does Dick not fuck you or are you just so greedy for cock you gotta try to get on K’s, too?” 

It had Lynch’s jaw clenching, his glittering eyes screaming  _ danger!  _ and his shoulders going even tighter with compressed wrath. His hands tightened convulsively on the steering wheel. 

“We gonna?” Lynch asked, and Proko nodded slowly, considering.

“We were always gonna,” he responded, and tossed the still-burning remains of his smoke out the window, rolling it up. Enclosing himself in glass and steel and leather. 

It felt like some Matrix womb shit, someplace safe. Coffin-like, almost, and had he always wanted to fucking die so bad or was there something about this town in the summer that made your insides decay?

The traffic light was red. He tightened his own hold on the wheel, pressed down on the gas as he took his foot off the clutch. 

The race wasn’t some play-by-play. There was nothing but the squeal of their tires and the tri-colored glow from the streetlights above; there was nothing but  _ this,  _ Proko and the car he’d dreamed up, made reality. An impossible fucking car, a car alive like the night. A car made for this, and he was made for this too: winning. Victory. Something he’d had far too little of in his life. Just enough to wet his lips, make his thirst insatiable. 

_ Fuck,  _ it was good. It was good. It was so fucking good, careening through the streets with the Camaro right on him, Lynch right fucking on him. Lynch, who didn’t even fucking  _ know  _ what he was up against. 

He thought of sticking his arm out the window, flipping Lynch the bird, and decided that  _ no,  _ he wasn’t going to deign to even acknowledge the fucker. He was better than that. Better than  _ Lynch.  _

He flew across the line that denoted victory, superiority, slammed his brakes and rode out the inevitable tailspin that followed, ending up panting and grinning and knocking his own head back against the headrest, high with it the way he never felt on pills or booze or coke. Everything was sweetly fizzing; his head was fucking spinning. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten, couldn’t remember anything. Couldn’t remember the color of K’s eyes or the musty smell of the closet in Moscow he’d watched his father die from. 

Which, of fucking course, is when he realized that Lynch and the Camaro were being practically dismembered by some huge-ass fucking bird creature. The sickeningly orange car careened, the bird creature clinging to its top, and by the time Proko realized there was not one bird creature but  _ two,  _ the Camaro had already slammed into a telephone pole, wrapping around it violently in a way that Proko knew very well there was no coming back from. 

Lynch looked way too unsurprised (unsurprised and fucking  _ terrified,  _ yeah, but unsurprised) for this to be some new and unexpected occurrence, Proko realized, and felt loathing rise up high in his throat when he realized what it must mean. What Lynch must  _ be _ . 

Hadn’t he just been thinking about how alike they were? 

He was out of the Jag before he was even consciously aware of making the decision, rolling his shoulders and wondering what the fuck his plan even was as he advanced on the totaled car, the birdmen, and Lynch. His blood was up, rushing in his ears. He felt like murder. There was an aluminum kind of taste at the back of his mouth. 

“Come on!” He shouted at the thing, feeling fearless. When was the last time he’d been afraid? Had it died with his father? 

(God,  _ fuck,  _ had he even been afraid then?) 

The thing rounded on him, diverted from Lynch, who was still white-faced with dread and  _ fear,  _ fucking boring. Its claws caught him in the chest, sliced him to ribbons, and Proko spat a laugh that sounded more like a scream. It hurt. Everything hurt. “Come the  _ fuck  _ on!” He shouted, English lost in his buzzing mania of suicidal glee. 

The bird-thing reared back like it was going to tear out his throat, and that’s when the gunshots started. Black blood like ink ran in rivulets from its feathery pelt, slid down, down, down to the asphalt and pooled like rainwater. It smelled like rotten corpses and licorice; in the back of his mind, Proko was grudgingly impressed with Lynch’s level of  _ actual psychopathy.  _ Who the fuck dreamt shit like this up?

The bullets came in a hail, six or seven shots that all connected with their target, and then the birdman was entirely,  _ had-to-be,  _ dead. 

Proko stumbled, and sat down hard; the blood loss had him dizzy, blinking slow and too-spaced, like he’d just taken a pill. 

“What the fuck,” he said, as K’s face appeared in his swimming line of vision. His expression was twisted up, not angry or blissed out or blank. It was… odd. 

Everything went black, then. 

***

The Henrietta ER was somehow shittier than every other ER Proko had ever been to— and with a track record like his, he and his grandmother had visited many a shitty emergency room. 

He woke up on a rickety stretcher bed and grimaced at the taste in his mouth, moving gingerly so as not to jostle the tender open rawness of what were sure to be some  _ top notch  _ stitches keeping his chest together. The vain part of him turned up its nose at the thought of what his scarring would look like, once it healed. All the other parts of him honestly didn’t give a fuck. Maybe he could Dream up some magical cream to erase the scars, anyway. 

He groaned and turned his head; he told himself he wasn’t expecting to see  _ anyone,  _ much less K, but still somehow it was a surprise to see Lynch, curled over in on himself with his head and hands dangling in the canyon between his spread knees. The top of his buzzcut was uncomfortably vulnerable and the sight of it made Proko swallow back bile. 

“Praying for me, Lynch?” Prokopenko asked, throat dry and voice crackling, trying to sound biting but missing the mark. “Ave Maria, gratia plenta…” He quoted, and the small, sharp laugh that left Lynch’s throat was startled and not entirely miserable. Almost  _ wondering _ . 

“Fuck off,” Lynch said, a little wet-sounding. “Fuck. Listen-“ he began, like he was gearing up for some gallows talk, and Proko shook his head, looked around. Said, loudly,  _ who the fuck do I have to fuck to get outta here?  _ obnoxious in his accent and his entitlement, two things that the people of Henrietta, North Carolina could not tolerate from raven-branded assholes like them. 

It was effective. 

The kind of talk Lynch wanted to have wasn’t the sort of shit you discussed out in the open. After half a lifetime of running and hiding, this was something Proko knew in his bones. 

***

“I don’t know what you fucking want me to say,” Proko said for the millionth time, smoking his dozenth cigarette in an hour. Lynch slammed his own head against the headrest a few times, groaning in frustration. 

“Tell me how you fucking  _ did it _ ,” he snarled, gesticulating violently at the car to encompass the Jag as an  _ it _ that had been  _ did _ . 

Proko shook his head, half-wished that the fucker spoke Russian so he could try and explain it that way. “You have to  _ want it _ ,” he stressed, scrubbing a hand through his hair. “You can’t be fuckin’...  _ afraid  _ or whatever the fuck—“ he exhaled through his nose hard enough for the smoke to burn. It helped, distracted him from the itch of his stitches and the nauseatingly raw feeling of his organs beneath, which felt like they’d been chafed by the wind that had touched them when he was cut to shreds by the bird-thing’s claws. 

His phone, in his pocket, remained still. No buzz of an incoming text or snap or fucking  _ email.  _ Fuck. 

Fucking  _ Joseph Kavinsky.  _

Lynch was coiled tight as a snake prepared to strike at the insinuation that it was  _ his  _ fault he didn’t understand, not Proko’s for being a half-asleep and three-quarters-disinterested teacher. 

The playing field between them felt more even than it ever had, but now that they could size each other up properly they liked what they saw even less than before. 

Proko took a deep breath in through his nose and threw both his cigarette butt and the pack out the window, forcing himself not to track their descent into the night-black grass of the junkyard clearing. 

His Golf sat with the door still wrenched open across from them, lonely-looking with the Jag’s headers casting it in white-blue light. 

K had blown the Mitsu up— he’d blown up his  _ baby,  _ or allowed it to be blown up, whatever, and though he didn’t have nearly as much attachment to the Golf, Proko reeled at the thought of doing the same. His grandmother had bought him that car, had smiled her little bittersweet Soviet-Regime-survivor smile and said  _ for you, my prince, no cost is too great  _ when she wrote out the check. 

Everything he had had come from either his grandmother or his Dreams; Proko valued  _ things _ more than K did, or even Lynch— K was a materialistic show-off who wanted to seem like nothing fucking mattered, much less the shiny sports car he’d lost his virginity in; Lynch was an emo bitch who prioritized his dead daddy issues over everything else, up to and including the property of the people he fucking claimed to love. 

They were both fucking  _ infuriating,  _ is what Proko meant. Now that he saw the truth in Lynch he wanted to laugh; he should’ve let them have each other. Should’ve let them burn each other to the fucking  _ ground.  _

“Look, okay,” Proko enunciated, trying to get it right. Trying to get Lynch the  _ fuck  _ away from him. “You are the creator. You have to know exactly what you fucking want. You are the one who puts it in the fucking Dream. You are the one who takes it out with you. It’s  _ you.  _ I can’t fucking—  _ teach you.  _ You want it?  _ Make it. _ ” 

He shook two bars of Xanax out of the bottle he’d retrieved from the backseat earlier, tapped a Vicodin from the bottle the hospital had given him. “Here.” He poured them into Lynch’s upturned palm. “Get out. Don’t fuckin die.” 

Lynch swallowed them dry with a glint in his eyes and an unfairly pretty contraction of his long throat, opening up the car door and going out into the dark. He only had to take five steps into the abyss to be swallowed up by it, and Proko leaned his head back, staring at the moon overhead through the Jag’s tinted windshield. 

He thought about how hard it might be to dream up a new Evo, down to the ugly-ass knife dripping blood sprayed on its side. He’d always hated that thing. It was  _ cheap _ . Ridiculous. He’d not grown up in the gutter to reach the penthouse only to find it decorated so  _ obscenely _ . 

That was why K had fascinated him from the start; he was so _ new money  _ it made you grind your teeth. From his cookie-cutter McMansion to his ugly fucking car to his stupid fucking sunglasses, Joseph Kavinsky was so far and away from everything that Proko had ever wanted. 

But here they were, and here Proko was, waiting for a text that likely would never come. K had not been waiting at his bedside like some devoted character in one of the stupid romances that Skov liked to watch. He was a ghost in the wind, probably snorting a line of coke off of some callgirl’s fake ass in the front seat of whatever fast and shiny new thing he’d driven to the dealership in D.C. to drop a fat stack of cash on. All while Proko fucking  _ pines  _ and joins the goddamn Scooby gang. 

He imagined having to be in the same room as Lynch and Three Dicks and that rumpled mess of a townie; imagined  _ hanging out  _ with them, talking about fucking model cities and diasporas and  _ whatever the fuck else.  _

He laughed until he felt strangled with it, until his stitches burned like fire and he had to pull up his shirt to check the state of them, taped tight beneath gauze that reeked of disinfectant. 

He breathed, getting himself under control again. 

***

When Proko woke up, he wasn’t exactly sure why. There was a bunch of fresh strawberries in his lap, plump and still on the vine. The tail end of the thing was curled greenly around his wrist and he had to unravel himself before he could bring one to his lips for a bite, the storm brewing outside an ambient soundtrack to such an unexpected awakening. 

The flavor was tart, sweet and new; the berry was not  _ quite  _ ripe, green-white around the cap and paler than the ones sold in stores this time of year. It tasted unfinished, which he chalked up to his premature waking. 

He blinked against the bright sunlight for a moment before he realized it wasn’t sunlight but  _ headlights,  _ and the rumble-roar outside wasn’t thunder from a summer storm but  _ an engine _ . 

The Dreamed-up Camaro was just as obnoxious as its real-life counterpart had been, screaming orange and long-nosed. A young man’s car, unmistakably, full of character and maudlin, redneck sex appeal. 

Lynch was obnoxious in the driver's seat, half-swooning over himself, running his hands reverently over the wheel. 

In the seat next to him, Lynch’s battered and outdated Nokia phone buzzed angrily against firm, unbroken-in leather.  _ Gansey, Gansey, Gansey, Gansey,  _ the missed calls scrolled across the cracked screen. 

Proko barked a laugh at the irony; he couldn’t get _his_ cult leader to even fucking text him, and here Lynch was hiding away from the zealous grasp of Richard Gansey III. 

He picked up the phone and thought about answering, thought about saying  _ hey, Three Dicks, Lynch can’t come to the phone right now because he’s sucking mine  _ or something else vulgar and trite like that. Something like what K, with his endless barrage of filth, would say. 

It was an unpleasant thought, and instead Proko pressed the  _ ignore  _ button firmly, sending Gansey to voicemail. 

Ahead, Lynch revved the copied Camaro’s engine. It sang, a joyous whine, and Proko rested his eyes against Lynch’s wondrous expression, the sight of his lush mouth muttering what was no doubt a prayer to the Almighty.  _ Give me a fucking break,  _ he thought, and ate another strawberry. 

***

He made it back to his dorm room and shouldered open the door, half-blind in his exhaustion. 

He expected to be alone; maybe Skov would be passed out in his own bed, but more likely there would be no one in the room but Proko himself, disturbing a fine layer of dust as he stumbled through some semblance of a nighttime routine, for all that it was 11:30 in the morning. 

When he realized that the room had been trashed, Proko stood still for a second, heart thundering and blood crashing like waves in his veins. Adrenaline stripped away exhaustion; he considered his options. The Dream gun was beneath a pile of laundry in the bathroom and Skov had a wicked-bladed switchblade hidden in his top desk drawer. 

He dove to the bathroom, deciding it was the better option. 

The place where the Dream gun had been hidden was empty, the laundry strewn about, and Proko leaned hard against the closed bathroom door, steadying himself. 

“Fuck,” he hissed, and thought of Moscow and of Magnitogorsk, thought of invading marauder men with daggers tattooed in their necks, an advertisement of their willingness to kill. 

(Was this fear? Had being nearly eviscerated knocked the emotion back into him, after all this time?) 

He steeled himself, squared his shoulders, ignored the pulled-tight pain in his chest. Clutching the blade of Skov’s hastily-dismantled razor in his fingers, he threw the bathroom door open again. 

The room was empty, no hired killers slinking out from the closet or beneath the bed. 

Proko let his shoulders drop minutely and stepped to his desk, keeping his eyes on the door. He snatched up his phone charger, a change of clothes, and, after a split-second of heart-pounding hesitation, the balled-up Armani socks that contained the Dream chain. 

_ Papa,  _ he mouthed, looking at the wreck of his dorm room, allowing himself a moment of weakness not unlike the one he’d taken at K’s abdicated houseparty, days and days ago now.  _ Papa.  _ He let himself remember what it was to crouch, young and untethered and  _ traumatized,  _ in the closet while his father’s corpse lay just meters away. How long he’d waited in that closet, until he was found by his father’s men. How they’d had to carry him, soaked in sweat and urine and tears, because there was broken glass everywhere and he had no shoes on. 

He left, and locked the door behind him. 

***

He thought about showing up at Monmouth Manufacturing, disdainfully claiming one of the unused rooms there surely were in that slummy hipster hellhole. Thought amusedly for a moment about the expression that Dick Cubed surely would make at the prospect of one of  _ Kavinsky’s pack of dogs  _ (as Proko had heard that neurotic Gap catalog motherfucker call them once, disdainful and lordly) invading his space. Sleeping in his  _ home.  _

He thought about going to Jiang and Swan’s place, crashing on their couch. Getting stoned and playing endless rounds of Mario Kart. Listening to the tinny beep of Swan’s battered GameBoy Advance well into the wee hours of the morning as the insomniac played Pokémon Silver with a blunt hanging out of his mouth, like he did every sleepless night. 

He thought, briefly and traitorously, of going to K’s, nodding respectfully at K’a ultra-American mother and slinking up the stairs to K’s room, stripping down and going to sleep above the covers while he waited for K to get home from wherever the fuck. Thought about arching his back as he woke to the sound of K in the doorway, enticing him into forgetting what had happened. 

In the end, he went back to the junkyard clearing. He stretched out in the grass beneath the hot summer sun and blinked up at the sky, hatefully perfect and blue. He was not so egotistical as to demand that even the sky bend to his mood, but Prokopenko still resented the hot July perfection of it all, ground his teeth at the nerve of the world to keep turning while his world was crashing down. 

(Had they come for him, the men he’d been assured over and over again were dead? The men who murdered his father?) 

He closed his eyes and thought about sunglasses, about a tent, about a water bottle that never was empty or too-warm. About lurid orange prescription bottles and inky-black flasks of liquor. A soft place to sleep. About  _ comfort.  _ Didn’t he deserve that? After all of this  _ shit,  _ didn’t he deserve it? 

He fell asleep, and he Dreamed. 

***

The hours passed in a blur of Dreaming and pills and liquor that tasted distinctly  _ dark blue,  _ like fire and salt and blueberries. 

Each time he opened his eyes there was something new to add to his odd little campsite. A towering tent with impossibly sheer panels. A goose-down mattress like his grandmother had always ran her hand longingly over in department stores, when they were nothing more than poverty stricken immigrants hiding from their own names. Blankets and pillows, enough to build himself a nest. A box fan that didn’t plug in to anything but still hummed and whirred. Piles of  _ shit,  _ books with no words and a perfect copy of Swan’s battered GameBoy, tattered copies of their Latin textbooks, colanders and bushels of ripened strawberries. 

He Dreamed in a riot of technicolor, deep in the forest that had always seemed too hungry to chance before, both of his arms out, hands grasping greedily at bunches of leaves. They tore from their branches with his force and transformed into whatever his brain could think up; still there was that hunger coiled in his gut for  _ more more more.  _

The Dream K slunk around the edges of his awareness, lips ripe and dark, blackberry-wine-stained, so unlike the real K as to be his opposite even though it was a doppelgänger.  _ Ilyusha,  _ the shade whispered, never close enough to touch but somehow the word finding its way to Proko’s ears anyway. 

Proko filled the tent and then the clearing; after a while everything came out half-formed and  _ not quite right.  _ He couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten anything except strawberries and though the Dream liquor was thick, it didn’t seem to have any substance. He felt light-headed whenever his eyes were open. The sky was black and then blue overhead, through the sheer ceiling of the tent, and Proko wasn’t sure what day it was. How much time had passed. 

(How long could he go on like this? How long could he go on before he just disappeared? Would it be better to disappear quietly or to die screaming under the hands of a hired assassin?) 

His bones felt empty, like his marrow had been hollowed out. 

He’d quintupled his grand total of Dream creations; they were no victory, made not for a purpose but just to be  _ made.  _ It felt cheap. He had an acidic taste on his tongue. His eyes wouldn’t focus. 

He closed his eyes; he stopped Dreaming. 

***

“Fucking  _ hell, _ ” came a grunt above him, and Proko’s eyes wouldn’t open long enough to focus, so he just had an impression of  _ black.  _ There was a sharp pain on his shoulder and he couldn’t raise his hand high enough to bat it away. 

“‘ck off,” he managed to mumble, and then his stomach heaved as he was hauled upright. He vomited messily, dimly aware that the retching made his stitches feel like they were screaming. He remembered that he was going to Dream something up for that. 

“Ugh,” a voice in his ear said, disgusted, and Proko was limp, knees wobbling like he was a baby deer and not a half-dead seventeen year old fuckup. 

“Kaw!” Shrieked Lynch’s bird, and Proko gave a full-body wince as his head protested the volume of the thing. 

“Shhh, baby,” Lynch said softly, and Proko had a moment of out-of-body surrealism before he realized that Lynch was talking to the  _ bird  _ and not him. 

Proko puked again, and let himself be dragged off, drifting. 

***

The bed was soft and wider than the one in his dorm room; for a long moment, Proko thought he was with K, in his bed. 

Then he realized he was in Lynch’s bed; the bird staring him in the face when he opened his eyes was a great context clue. 

“Fuck,” he croaked, and slowly made his way upright, swallowing hard. 

He kept a hold on the wall as he staggered out of Lynch’s room and into the lion’s den. 

“—still don’t understand  _ what  _ he’s doing here, Ronan!” Dick Cubed was saying in his earnest, Gap catalog model voice. Lynch’s shoulders were up; he was practically hissing like a wet cat. It wasn’t a good look on him, Proko noted, not too far gone to be smug. 

He cleared his throat and almost lost his composure when Dick Cubed whirled and gave him a strained sort of smile, a politician looking upon a sack of shit that has just been delivered at their door. Politely horrified. 

“Ah, Prokopenko. Hello. Ronan, aren’t you going to offer him something to eat? Maybe a shower?” Proko barked a rasping laugh that felt like he was coughing up rusty nails. 

“‘S that door,” Lynch shrugged coolly, nodding in the general direction of the bathroom, and Proko nodded back, deciding that a shower was the best place to start. Either he’d drown himself or he’d come out feeling more human and less like a mummified urchin. 

***

“This is shit,” he informed Lynch and Dick Cubed even as he scarfed down the onion rings they’d brought back for him from that dive bar in Henrietta’s piss poor excuse of a  _ downtown _ . The grease settled in his empty stomach and made him feel rejuvenated and nauseous all at once. Lynch’s clothes were ill-fitting on him— too baggy in the waist and too tight in the shoulders and ass, too  _ black,  _ too utilitarian. He considered the tee shirt and ripped jeans an affront to the institution of haberdashery; he wondered where the hell his silver crucifix had gotten to. 

Dick growled, seemingly more taken aback by his lack of manners than anything else thus far. Ronan just flipped him the bird and rubbed his hands roughly over his own face, groaning exhaustedly. Proko wondered when he’d last gotten a full night’s rest; the rings beneath his eyes were bruiselike, eggplant-purple thumbprints etched deep into his already-sallow skin. 

“Listen, asshole,” Lynch finally said, pulling down his hands, slowly enough that it pulled the skin of his face grotesquely and revealed the inside of his eyelids. It was, also, not the best look on him, a boyish sort of move that pleased Prokopenko, further humanized the legend that Lynch had become in his aggravated mind. “My dad could do it too.” He said it like some big revelation and Proko waited, squinting, for something surprising to pass his lips. 

“Ehh,” he said, cocking his head and making a hand motion that was  _ especially  _ Slavic, feeling like a stereotype. “Yeah? That’s how it works.” He wanted to laugh at Lynch’s incomprehension, but Lynch’s gaping was tinged with the sort of defensiveness that meant violence wasn’t far off. 

“Explain.” Dick demanded, short and clipped and as severe as any headmaster; Proko imagined him sitting behind Headmaster Child’s desk for a brief second, fingers steepled and eyebrows arched at some new raven-breasted whelps. Strangely, no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t imagine Dick  _ older,  _ just settled in a highbacked chair as youthful as ever, commanding and terrible like a statue of Apollo. It was a disconcerting thought; maybe he was still not  _ quite _ sober. 

He sighed, scrubbing his hands over his own face, and settled in for a long afternoon. 

***

Lynch flounced off to deal with his overload of newfound information and of course Dick rushed off after him, leaving Proko alone with the trailer trash. He leveled a look at the townie, taking him in from the top of his cowlicked head to his scuffed sneakers. He was too skinny; if they had any sense at all, Lynch and Dick Cubed would feed him more regularly. 

He wandered aimlessly to a cluttered table instead of engaging the native, plucking a book from it at random.  _ The Revolt of Owain Glyn Dwr,  _ and was this how these misfits occupied their time? Reading boring books? He rubbed at his temples, feeling a headache coming on, and wished to be anywhere but Monmouth Manufacturing. 

Where the  _ fuck  _ was K? 

The townie cleared his throat; when he spoke, his mouth was full of  _ Henrietta  _ and  _ disgust _ and Proko grinned in vicious response immediately, every inch the half-starved feral dog he’d always been. 

“You shouldn’t touch that.” It was shortly said, and when Proko laughed he could see the fury rise up in those  _ lovely _ blue eyes. He tossed the book carelessly back onto the table, sending pens skittering with a clatter. It made his headache worse but it was worth it to see the way the townie’s shoulders tightened. He wanted to hit something, and he was afraid of it. Of himself. 

How fucking  _ stupid _ , to be scared of what was inside of you when there was so much to be scared of  _ outside  _ of you. 

The townie took a step forward. Proko flicked his eyes over him again,  _ slow,  _ licking across his teeth lasciviously. Exaggerated in his obscenity. 

Those eyes flashed again, both revulsed and  _ not _ , and Proko took his own step forward, hips tipped invitingly and fists clenched. 

“What the fuck?” Lynch’s voice was a snarl and the local froze up, eyes going both icy and ashamed, like an animal caught misbehaving by its master. Resentful and penitent. It was…  _ interesting.  _

Proko rocked back on his heels and gave Lynch his semi-divided attention. 

“Kavinsky has been fucking texting me nonstop for the last twenty minutes,” Lynch said, crossing the stained floor to shove his Nokia into Proko’s chest. He wrinkled his nose at the uninvited touch and how it smeared the rough fabric of his borrowed shirt into his still-raw skin. 

**the fuck is he**

**bitch bitch bitch bitch**

**what too fucking cool for me now**

**BITCH BITCH BITCH**

**where is P**

**where**

**is**

**prokopenko**

**FUCKING CUNT**

**tell me where he fucking is**

He could imagine all of it spewing out of K’s mouth, could see his thin lips forming the words and his teeth bared behind them. 

His stomach swooped in a way both terrifying and pleasant; some unoccupied part of his brain thought that this was what other people felt when they got a bouquet of flowers or were whisked off for a surprise vacation to Cancun. Validation, care,  _ romance.  _ Fuck. He was fucked up. 

“Looks like it’s time to go,” Proko said with a shrug, wondering if he could remember Skov’s number. He’d need a ride back to the dorm at least, if not back to the junkyard to collect his vehicle. One of them, anyway. 

“Yeah,” Lynch said, eyes a little dark, a little wild. “About that.” 

***

“Cabeswater?” The word didn’t want to form in his mouth, like he was trying to speak around a cheekful of marbles. “What the fuck have you fuckers gotten yourself fucking into?” 

“Charming,” Dick murmured under his breath, scanning over a page in his battered book. Proko thought darkly about American boys and their love of Indiana Jones for a long moment, rolling his eyes to the heavens. His arms jerked against his makeshift bonds reflexively, his right hand wanting to come up and trace over the crucifix no longer hanging over his sternum. The Aglionby tie they’d used to bind his wrists behind his back did not give a centimeter no matter how hard he pulled at it. Dick must’ve been a Boy Scout, in this life or the last, or maybe he was just less of a robot than Proko had pegged him for. 

“You’ve got to  _ stop,  _ okay?” Lynch said, squatted down in front of where they’d wrestled Proko into one of the antique wooden chairs that cluttered the edges of the room. “You’re draining the ley line and I’ve got to wake her up. I’ve got to.” 

Proko blinked at him, feeling like when he’d first come to America and hadn’t yet mastered English. Off-balanced and uncomprehending, headache coming on as he tried to make sense of what he was being told. 

“What are you fucking  _ talking about,  _ Lynch?” He finally asked, brows furrowing. 

“My dad could do it too,” Lynch repeated his statement from earlier, and his shoulders drew up tight. “And he dreamed up my mom, and then he was killed because he could do it— and I can’t fucking go  _ home,  _ and my mom is asleep, or— and if I bring her to Cabeswater then she’ll wake up, and I can’t fucking do that if you’re fucked up in the woods and taking too much energy from the ley line—“ he broke off and clenched his jaw, voice cracking on the last word. 

Proko blinked again, words organizing themself in his head and revulsion rising up in him, an unfamiliar feeling. “He  _ Dreamt her?”  _ He tried to imagine it, imagine dragging the Dream K out into the real world and then  _ marrying it.  _

“Yes—“ Lynch began, almost impatiently, before registering the look of horror on Proko’s face. “Fuck you, it wasn’t like—“ he cut himself off, swallowing, seemingly unwilling to even say what it  _ wasn’t like.  _

“Then what  _ was _ it like?” Proko’s words were harsh when they snapped out of him. “Because it  _ sounds _ pretty bad, Lynch.” 

Lynch’s fist flew into his face then, and Proko’s head snapped backwards upon impact, bashing the base of his skull on the chair’s high back. He could hear his nose crunch and taste blood at the back of his tongue. 

“Ronan!” Dick shouted, and a second hit didn’t come. Proko blinked slowly up at the ceiling, head too heavy to lift for a long moment, and thought that he might choke on the blood filling up his mouth. 

He lifted his head and the room spun. Unconsciousness came quickly after, and Proko’s last thought was that he was getting fucking tired of this shit. 

***

“-don’t know  _ what _ you were thinking-“ the voice was low and feminine, and for a dazed moment Proko thought of his mother, though it had been years (years and  _ years)  _ since he’d heard her voice, not to mention that she was dead and had never even attempted to speak English. 

The pain in his head was splitting and he groaned, rolling to the side and curling his body up, unable to resist the urge to make himself as small as possible, like he could hide from the hurt that way. 

“-he  _ okay?  _ Ronan, damn it-“ there were hands on him and he cringed away from them, shrugging his shoulders and clenching his eyes tight. The hands were insistent, though, and finally he opened his eyes, squinting against the low light that was still too bright for his retinas’ liking. 

The girl was not  _ quite _ anything special, with a snub nose and cinnamon-toned skin, her eyes dark and critical. She wasn’t Three Dicks, though, or likely to do him any more physical harm, so Proko liked her better than any of the rest of the inhabitants of Monmouth, on principal. 

“Keep your eyes open so I can check for a concussion,” she ordered in that low, melodic voice. It was a voice devoid of judgement, and that was what made him keep his eyes open obediently and not swear when she shined a penlight into them, watching the reactivity of his pupils. He knew the drill. She made a soft little  _ hmm  _ of consideration. “Looks okay.” 

She pulled him upright with a hand on his shoulder, skin cool and touch impersonal. He liked the impartiality of her, the way she seemed more like a mirror than a person even though she had to have some kind of opinion of him. She was from Henrietta, he could hear that in her vowels; he was a foreigner, a raven-emblemed interloper, one of Joseph Kavinsky’s dogs. 

“Can you walk?” She asked. “We have somewhere to be.” He groaned and felt gingerly at his face, grazing his fingertips around the bridge of his nose. 

“Da,” he grumbled, and let her lead him outside. When he squinted and let out a low groan of misery in the sunlight she shoved a pair of sunglasses at him. He stuffed them onto his face, past caring that they looked like a prop for a Wes Anderson movie, plastic and obvious. 

Three Dicks leaned against the side of his copied Camaro, eyes suspicious as they darted between him and the girl. “Are you okay, Blue?” He asked her, somehow both haughty and genuinely concerned. She bristled, lips pursing like she wanted to smile and also wanted to shout. Proko could relate. 

He felt like that a lot when K spoke. 

***

The alleged assassin was not what Proko had expected; he was as colorless as a glass of milk and had soft-looking hands. It was rather a disappointment; American assassins were not nearly as terrifying as Russian ones, who advertised their willingness, their  _ viciousness  _ in ink on their skin. 

Lynch was a pent-up whirlwind of fury, and Proko was equally as unimpressed by his outburst as he was with the supposed assassin. 

“What the fuck is a  _ Greywaren?”  _ Proko spat under his breath, rolling his eyes. He was getting the feeling that when you hung around Three Dicks, your sense of the dramatic inflated to something both ridiculous and rather sad. Glancing at the girl,  _ Blue,  _ he thought that she might feel the same way. 

Lynch didn’t strangle the Gray Man to death, which was yet another disappointment. No matter how amiable or bland he may seem, Proko thought, he still had killed Lynch’s father in cold blood. If Proko came face-to-face with his own father’s killer there would be no hesitation, no mitigating factors. He would  _ end him.  _ Beat him to death, slow and  _ bloody.  _

Lynch was weak, a once-rabid dog on a short leash. It was disgusting. 

Proko ducked outside and wished for a cigarette, keeping his eyes on the skyline. He wanted this fever dream to be over; he wanted to go back to his own fucking life, where there was nothing more than what he could do and what he would do, keeping his head down and keeping his eyes on K. 

He wanted to live his fucking life, or die; something, he wanted  _ something,  _ just not whatever the hell these jackoffs had going. Relative obscurity was what he wanted, not to become a new-age myth. The Dreaming was bad enough. He had no room for any weirdness but that. 

“Prokopenko.” Lynch’s voice was hard and his pronunciation painful. “You’ve got to fucking see this.” And there was that Nokia again, lit up with two messages from two different senders. One, not even saved, K’s number. The other,  _ Matthew.  _

**what up mofo**

**what up mofo**

Well, fuck. 

***

K was leaned up against the side of a new Mitsubishi, this one a lurid red. 

Lynch’s little brother didn’t look a damn thing like him, burly and golden-haired, a cherub to his older brother’s  _ Legion _ -style archangel, scared and blurry-eyed. It made Proko uncomfortable to look at him too closely- he wasn’t used to that kind of innocence. He knelt, shaking, at K’s feet. 

K’s hips jutted and he wore his stupid fucking sunglasses even though it was dark; fireworks exploded overhead and he held Proko’s Dream gun loosely in his right hand, like it belonged to him. 

“Give him to me, Lynch!” K shouted, sounding both furious and jovial, gesturing with the gun. “And nobody gets hurt, huh Matty?” He nudged the boy with the toe of his sneakers. He looked too-thin, half-dead in the dark. A skeleton of a boy. 

Proko shoved his way out of the backseat of the Camaro and clenched his jaw, rolling his eyes at all the fucking posturing. 

“What the fuck are you doing, asshole?” He shouted back, in English for the benefit of his reluctant companions. 

K jerked a little in his surprise, clearly expecting--  _ what?  _ A fucking hostage situation? They were  _ seventeen,  _ for fuck’s sake. This was  _ ridiculous.  _

“You’re with  _ him _ ?” K asked, voice shaking dangerously, words in Russian. Excluding anyone else but them. 

“I’m not with  _ him,  _ you fuckweasel.” Proko snarled in response, taking a step forward and shaking off Dick’s attempts at grabbing his elbow to hold him back. “Put down the fucking gun, you’re a fucking  _ joke. _ ” 

He was  _ seething,  _ suddenly, boiling over in his anger. How was this his fucking  _ life?  _ Henrietta couldn’t be  _ this  _ fucking boring, to make them all so starved for action that they devolved into this  _ Lord of the Flies _ bullshit. 

“If you’re not with me, you’re against me.” K retorted, sharp, every inch the cliche of a self-destructive teenager with too much time on his hands, ego propelling him to supervillain status. 

Proko strode forward, uncaring of the gun or Matthew Lynch or anyone else but  _ him and K _ . That’s all there was. Nothing else. 

K’s wrist was thin and cold when he grabbed it, prying the gun from his fingers and tossing it to the side. K peered up at him, sunglasses blocking his hollow eyes from view, and Proko tossed them away, too, careless.  _ Furious _ . 

“There’s more to life than this.” He said, through his teeth. “You need to grow the fuck up.” 

“Why?” K asked, sounding on the verge of hysteria. “ _ Why _ ? What else is there? Nothing. Just you and me. Just us.” 

“Just  _ you, _ ” Proko murmured. “I’m fucking done. I’m done. Get the fuck out of here.” And somehow that worked; K went limp like all of his strings had been cut and he looked too-young, too jaded to exist in real life. An endangered species, rotting slowly from the inside. Proko ached to look at him; he wanted to wrap his hands around K’s throat and squeeze. He wanted to kneel at K’s feet and beg him to stay, beg him to be what Proko was  _ sure  _ he could be. Better than this. A prince among peasants. The only person he could see himself taking his father’s kingdom back with. The only person he could see himself leaving it all behind with, because if he had K then why did he need revenge? Why did they need to become their fathers, if they could belong to each other? 

But there was nothing left, now, and Proko was done, and K was decaying. K was  _ leaving,  _ getting into his car and  _ leaving,  _ and Proko was left with the Scooby Gang at his back, a fucking  _ brotherly reunion  _ featuring Dick Cubed and his  _ feelings  _ and Blue, who seemed to have none. 

Fuck.  _ Fuck.  _

***

His room was too-empty; Skov had cleared out, and Proko couldn’t even fucking  _ sleep  _ because it was so quiet. He didn’t want to sleep, anyway; he didn’t want to Dream. 

_ Just you and me,  _ K had said, sounding like that was all he fucking  _ needed _ . Fuck. Proko wanted to break something. He wanted to get fucked up. He wanted to start screaming and not stop, like he hadn’t gotten that out of his system in this hellish odyssey. It all should’ve felt like closure; he’d been redeemed, gotten out from under K’s shadow and helped Buffy and the Do-Gooders on their quest. Helped wake up Lynch’s Stockholmed Dream mom. Saved the mystical forest. Rescued the golden-haired damsel. 

They’d thrown the ring into Mount fucking Doom but here he fucking was, wishing that the head orc was still hanging around. 

It was fucking annoying. He tugged at his own hair and grabbed his keys, rooting around in his sock drawer. 

“Fuck me,” he muttered, and shoved the gold Dream chain into his pocket. 

***

The new Mitsu was as blood-red as its predecessor had been moon-white and its engine growled as it flew up and down Seventh Street, furiously daring anyone to pull it over. 

He pulled even with it at the last red light, revved his engine and didn’t roll down his window. K didn’t attempt communication, either. There would be no shouting from car to car, just the press of feet to gas pedals and hands on clutches. 

Seventh Street led straight out of town, a dark length of state road that stretched out into the blackness of the night endlessly, and Proko wanted to follow it as long as possible, as  _ fast  _ as possible. 

The light changed, went green, and Proko’s stomach jumped when he stomped on the gas, shifting gears, adrenaline better than any other high, any pill or powder or liquor. It all felt clean, clean like pure white coke in perfect lines, like a sharp knife cutting through something soft, like mass on Easter morning, head bowed and springtime sunlight streaming in through stained glass windows. Holy. 

His world narrowed down to the Jag, down to his own heartbeat, down to the lines on the road and the expansive stretch of his headlights on the asphalt, catching the little reflective plastic pieces and lighting them up like votives. 

K was gone, the Mitsu was an afterthought, there was nothing else but  _ this,  _ and Proko thought that he could do  _ this  _ forever. 

K, not one to be ignored, accelerated and pulled forward, swerving madly, slamming on his breaks and spinning out in a spectacular show of  _ I don’t give a fuck,  _ suicidal ideation in full technicolor. 

Proko slammed on his breaks, came  _ this close  _ to t-boning the drivers’ side of the Mitsu, and imagined that he had, for a moment. That there had been impact, that he’d slammed right into where K sat. That K would bleed out in his arms on this abandoned road with help miles and miles away, just them and the stars and the blood. 

Would it be worse than watching his father die? 

He threw open the Jag’s door and was out before he even really decided to do it, breaths coming too-fast and cold all over, sweat slick on the back of his neck. In his mind’s eye K grinned with bloody teeth and said something trite and unforgettable,  _ reality is a fucking nightmare,   _ died in his arms, gone forever. Gone, gone, gone, and he wrenched the Mitsu’s door open, wrapped his hands around K’s throat, his shoulder, anywhere he could fucking get a good handful of flesh and bone, dragging him out. He couldn’t tell if he was speaking or if K was; he felt like all of his breaths were too-loud, like he was making too much noise. 

“God _ fucking _ dammit, K,” he tried to say, so throaty that it didn’t even sound like his voice to his own ears. He felt possessed, his blood whooshing in his ears and every movement taking concentration so he wouldn’t start to shake. He slammed K up against the side of the F-Type and fumbled in his jacket pocket. Everything went from too-cold to too-hot, the air congested with water vapor, the phantom scent of blood in his nose. 

“What— what are you—“ K said, in a voice rising in pitch,  _ hysterical _ , eyes wide and suddenly, horribly  _ young.  _ Young and fucked up and  _ sober  _ and Proko had been kidding himself all along if he thought this was ever going to end in any other way. 

K flinched when he brought the chain up and fumbled to clasp it shut, catching a couple of the short hairs at the nape of his neck that his barber needed to cut like  _ yesterday.  _ That in itself was telling, that K would neglect his clockwork haircut appointments. 

K held his breath for a moment like he was waiting for something terrible and Proko wanted to shout at him that they weren’t Sicilians and this wasn’t  _ The Godfather _ and he wasn’t about to be garotted, even if he probably deserved to be. He settled instead for pressing his mouth to the skin of K’s neck, right next to where the diamonds glittered against his sallow, olive-toned skin. 

“You’re mine, you’re  _ mine  _ and I am  _ yours  _ you fucking fuck—“ he choked on his words, whispering furiously, and bit a dark mark onto K’s neck, another statement. “I don’t care about Lynch I don’t care about any of this  _ shit _ I don’t care, K—“  _ I am so fucking in love with you,  _ he didn’t say, but knew that it hung in the scant centimeters of air between them as plainly as if he had. 

K moaned in the back of his throat, eyes closed and face tilted up like a statue of a saint to be adored, hollow-cheeked and  _ exhausted,  _ exhaling like he’d been holding his breath for years and years. 

(Like he’d been holding his breath since that day at the lake.) 

His hands raked up the front of Proko’s shirt and they traced over where Lynch’s subconscious had tried to gut him. 

_ You’ve saved my life twice now,  _ Proko wanted to whisper, but even that felt too much, like it would break the sanctity of the moment. 

“ _ Ilusha,”  _ K whispered fiercely, like he didn’t want to and also like he wanted to more than anything in the world, a loathsome and loving sound. Proko understood. He hated this too, baring his underbelly. 

“I know,” he murmured, and pressed his lips to K’s. Not kissing, just pressing, breathing in sync. “I know.” 

***

(When they were fifteen, the summer after freshman year, they were the only two from the pack left in town. K lived there and Proko wasn’t heading back to his grandmother’s until the dorms closed, a few days from then. He wanted to soak up as much of K’s attention as possible, and with Skov and Swan and Jiang gone, it felt like a more achievable sort of want than it had been before. 

K wanted to go down to the lake and get fucked up and float around; Proko wanted to do whatever K wanted to do, so he’d shrugged gamely and put on his trunks and nothing else, crucifix gleaming on his sweat-slicked sternum and toes oddly long and bare in his flipflops, twin Medusas staring up at him in rubber relief. 

K had raided the local Dollar General for floats, and got some fresh shit off his dealer. It was  _ supposed  _ to be Xanax, and even though Proko had his own prescription he never turned down what K offered him. 

[That was trust; that was naïveté; that was not actually caring what happened, if he lived or died.]

It was  _ supposed  _ to be Xanax, but he’d been floating one moment in a haze on a float in the middle of the lake and the next he’d been choking and sputtering with K half-wild above him, bruises blooming on his chest from the compressions of K’s bony hands. 

He’d almost died, and it had been K’s fault. 

It was like a switch had been flicked, after that. K was less of a young god in his own eyes, was more aware that the things he owned [like Proko] were mortal, even if he didn’t quite believe himself to be, too.) 

***

“I still say Three Dicks is putting at least one of them in Lynch on the daily,” K muttered in his ear, draped all over his back. Proko rolled his eyes, pinching his palm where their fingers were laced together over his chest. Skov laughed at something Swan said, and Jiang barely looked up from his Calc book to mutter  _ fucking idiots  _ in their general direction. 

“I still say you’re going to fucking fail Calc if you don’t fucking study,” Proko retorted. 

“What do I need Calculus for,  _ matse?”  _ K purred, too seductive by half for a skinny eighteen year old boy in ugly sunglasses, though the red Wayfarers were a definite step up from his white Oakleys, crushed to pieces in a field somewhere in this backwater helltown. 

Proko couldn’t come up with an answer that would convince  _ anyone,  _ much less Joseph Kavinsky, and so instead he turned his head and drew the bridge of his nose over the ridge of K’s jaw, affectionate and teasing. “If you pass the test, I’ll let you drive the Jag.” He murmured, grinning just a little. Relishing, even two months later, that he got to have this. K,  _ his.  _ No one else’s. 

“You’d let me do that anyway,” K pointed out, smug, dragging his hand down to grope at one of Proko’s pecs, delighting in his own public vulgarity. Sure in his own victory. 

“ _ And, _ ” Proko drew out, grinning wider, a sharklike expression. “I’ll blow you while you do.” 

K barked a laugh, throwing his head back, a jackal’s howl. “You’re fucking on,” he replied, and didn’t even snort when Proko nodded in acknowledgement at Lynch, Three Dicks, and the Townie, clustered in a knot around Three Dicks and his ever-present notebook. 

They were gonna be okay. 


End file.
